Thursday, July 5, 2012

Always a way

I have always been a big proponent of Linkedin. I was an early adopter and have seen its growth skyrocket in the last few years. Some say that it is Facebook for business, which ever way you look at it you really a place you need to be if you are serious about your career or your business. You can view my public profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/ciaops and if you are already on Linkedin then feel free to connect up with me directly.

One of the surprising benefits I found from Linkedin was the fact that once I linked my Twitter feed into the Linkedin my audience grew significantly. I also found far more interaction with what I posted in my Twitter stream from people who saw the information via Linkedin. I was therefore disappointed to read about the fact that this would no longer be available.

After some consideration I have found what I think is a suitable replacement using If This Then That.

If This Then That is a very simply yet power site. It allows you to create automation ‘recipes’ from other online services. I already use the user to send a copy of every tweet that I do to the online notebook Evernote. All I needed to do was create something similar but send it to Linkedin.

Once you create an account you think link in your online services or ‘channels’. Here you can see some of the ‘channels’ I have already configured (including Linkedin)

I can now start linking these services together via simple rules.

In the case above, if I tweet with Twitter post that tweet to an update on Linkedin.

So here’s the tweet and

Here’s the update on Linkedin (it may take up to 15 minutes to come through).

Pretty handy eh? If you haven’t looked at If This Then That then I recommend you do. There is a thriving community of people developing and sharing recipes, so you don’t even need to make your own!

If This Then That to me point in the direction we’ll see with cloud services. Basically you’ll be able to easily and simply combine them together and automatically share data and information between them. Very, very powerful when you think about it.